Embattled Senator and wife give TV interview

Senator Craig yesterday filed notice in Minnesota that he intends to appeal a lower court's decision to uphold his guilty plea.

“I was very, very embarrassed about it,” Senator Larry Craig says of his arrest earlier this year as part of a sex sting in a Minneapolis airport during an interview airing tonight on NBC television programme Matt Lauer Reports.

“I didn’t want to embarrass my wife, my kids, Idaho and my friends.”

According to those who have seen the hour-long interview, Craig’s wife, Suzanne, tells host Matt Lauer that learning of her husband’s arrest was “like the floor was falling out from under me.”

And when she was told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call was going to write about the incident?

It felt “almost like I was going down a drain for a few moments,” she reportedly told Lauer.

Senator Craig yesterday filed notice in Minnesota that he intends to appeal a lower court’s decision to uphold his guilty plea, which he tried to have dismissed.

He admitted to not feeling so well himself following his June arrest. The main cause of his unease: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

“I’d worked hard for him here in (Idaho),” Craig said, according to a report in today’s Boston Herald.

“I was a co-chair of his campaign on Capitol Hill. And he not only threw me under his campaign bus, he backed up and ran over me again.”

Senator Craig also apparently talks to Lauer about his decision to stay in the Senate.

The Idaho senator said he would step down from his seat after his arrest became public, but he has since changed his mind and now says he will complete his term.

“I don’t just walk away from a fight,” Craig reportedly says in the interview, which also will air tomorrow morning on NBC’s Today show. “This is the toughest fight of my political life.”